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Comment by donnachangstein | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia has been captured by special interests.

I recently watched The Silence of the Lambs, an Academy Award winning movie from the early 90s. Afterward, I skimmed the Wikipedia article to see if I missed any plot details.

There is a whole section on how the movie is considered transphobic by some nobodies, how the director defends that it isn't, blah blah blah. Having just watched the film, the thought didn't even enter my mind. I realized that the entire section is irrelevant to someone seeking information about the movie and at its worst, an opinion piece or cleverly disguised political shit-stirring.

Wikipedia is full of stuff like this. As a comparison I checked a 'real' encyclopedia (with editors) and of course not a mention of this, just the facts. Any attempt to delete irrelevant stuff from Wikipedia is closely guarded by self-appointed article gatekeepers because it has 'sources'.

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That doesn't have anything to do with special interests.

Literally nearly every Wikipedia page for a fictional work or creator will have a section on "controversies" or similar, if there have been any. Regardless of which political direction they go in. If it's been covered in the media or a book or whatever, it tends to be included.

This is a good thing. It helps situate everything in a broader cultural context. When I look something up on Wikipedia, I want to know these things. It's not irrelevant and it's not an opinion piece.

It's not like the articles takes sides. They just objectively describe the controversies which are real objective things which exist.

I find it curious that you seem to want to be shielded from the existence of these controversies. Nobody is forcing you to read them. But many people do genuinely find them useful and informative.

The problem is controversies can be embellished. In this case, the controversy focused on a minor detail among hundreds of others in a nearly two hour long film.

Is there guidance on what makes a controversy 'notable', or can anything be listed there? E.g. "Nobody blogger and her Twitter army were upset about $thing" - does that qualify? Nearly anything can be controversial, or have fabricated controversies. You see this a lot on political articles.

I don't know what you mean by "embellished". Are you saying the statements in Wikipedia are false?

And yes, obviously controversy will focus on the one controversial detail. There are hundreds of other details that are not controversial, so they aren't mentioned.

I don't understand why this bothers you. The world is a controversial place. It's good to document these things.

It’s a post facto embellishment for modern times. When that movie came out, no one was saying that nor is it relevant or correct. We might as well put a controversy template on every Wikipedia page and wait for someone to invent a perceived injustice.

If something is controversial to an insignificantly small number of people, is it by definition a controversy?

Hypothetically speaking, let's say you were a famous or notable person. Your Wikipedia article would probably have a controversy section with a vague statement like, "Some people find crazygringo's feet objectionable."

The citation would be a podcast where a guest told the host in an offhand comment, "I went on a date with crazygringo once and thought he had oddly-shaped feet."

Any attempt to delete this statement, even by you with full knowledge of your own feet, would be reverted as 'vandalism'.

This is Wikipedia in a nutshell.

Articles for celebrities and political figures are full of this garbage, which merely 10 years ago we would consider exclusively tabloid fodder.

I've read articles on complete nobody actresses with a controversy section that listed any and every political opinion she's ever said. It's a lame attempt to extrapolate (or reimagine) someone's entire personality from a few offhand statements made once in her life.

It's low quality content like this that undermines Wikipedia. Unfortunately it's all over the site and growing by the day.

So don’t use Wikipedia then. Problem solved.

Have you actually tried to tag, edit, or leave comments when you come across questionable content?

I’ve found that the system works pretty well. It’s not perfect, but I can’t think of a better solution.

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